Trevor Bruttenholm
English academic and adoptive father of the demon Hellboy.
He first appeared in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction issue #1 in 1994. As the adoptive father of the titular protagonist, he is a central figure in the series.
Quick Facts
- Publisher
- Dark Horse Comics
- Debut
- Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1994)
- Creators
- Mike Mignola
- Species
- Human
- Alliances
- B.P.R.D.
- Partners
- Tom Manning
- Aliases
- Professor Trevor Broom
- Powers
- Genius-level intellect; Expert in supernatural and paranormal phenomena
Facts from the source article.
Fictional character biography
Trevor Bruttenholm was an English scholar with deep knowledge of the supernatural and a member of the British Paranormal Society. When the Allies discovered that Adolf Hitler was racing to harness the occult for World War II, Bruttenholm advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The mystic Rasputin had devised Project Ragna Rok, a scheme to win the war through black magic. But on December 23, 1944, in East Bromwich, England, a young demon fell into Bruttenholm’s hands instead of Rasputin’s. He named the creature Hellboy. The two formed a powerful father-son bond and joined the U.S. government’s Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. Bruttenholm later retired from the Bureau but returned to fieldwork. He vanished in 1992 during the Cavendish expedition to the Arctic Circle. He resurfaced alive in 1994 during the Seed of Destruction arc, but a frog monster killed him before he could explain himself to Hellboy. His death marked Hellboy’s first encounter with agents of the Ogdru Jahad. A revived Rasputin, whom Bruttenholm had met in the North, was ultimately responsible. Hellboy later stopped Rasputin’s plan to free the Ogdru Jahad and watched him burn alive.
In other media
Trevor Bruttenholm appears in the 2004 motion picture Hellboy. As a young man in 1944, played by Kevin Trainor, he accompanies American commandos to stop Rasputin's Project Ragna Rok. He is shot in the leg by Karl Ruprecht Kroenen, causing a permanent limp, but destroys the portal machine with a hand grenade, maiming Kroenen. When the infant Hellboy appears, Broom adopts him and raises him as human. In the film's present, Broom, played by John Hurt, is dying of cancer and selects agent John Myers as Hellboy's new liaison. Rasputin kills Broom to lure Hellboy to his grave, taunting him that he nurtured a creature destined to bring the Apocalypse. Broom responds that he will always see Hellboy as his son, accepts his fate, and is killed by Kroenen. Later, Myers stops Hellboy from releasing the Ogdru Jahad by throwing him Broom's rosary, reminding him of his father's teaching to choose his own path. Hellboy tears off his regrown horns and kills Rasputin. Mike Mignola noted how closely Hurt resembled his original illustrations of Bruttenholm. In the sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Bruttenholm appears only in a flashback prologue set in 1955, again played by Hurt. He raises the young Hellboy in secret on a U.S. Air Force base in New Mexico, reading him a story about the Golden Army on Christmas Eve. In the present, Hellboy wears his father's rosary beads as a bracelet.
More in Characters & Cast
Elsewhere in Hellboy
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